CEDARS+ is a new font categorisation system by the folks over at ilovetypography. Rather than trying to define fonts by fairly abstract categories like neogothic or Didone, ILT have come up with a system that breaks a font down into specific traits:
- Contrast
- Energy
- Details
- Axis
- Rhythm
- Structure
- + (basically anything else; allowing them to more easily extend relevant filters based on alphabet or character sets, thereby supporting a wider range of languages and writing systems)
It's a neat idea explained more fully in the introductory blog post, but I honestly didn't think a huge amount about it until I saw it in action on their font search engine. Being able to filter fonts by the physical characteristics, such as slant or line thickness, just feels a whole lot more intuitive to me, particularly as someone who couldn't name more than a half dozen "traditional" font categories. Hopefully, more places adopt the system in the future.
